A Question Worth Asking

One thing about not having to worry about school or a job is that I finally have the time to sit down and actually read some of the books on my ‘to read’ list. One of these books which I eagerly added to my list after this past summer was the book God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and why the good news is better than Love wins by Mark Galli. I’m not going to summarize the book, though I will say that I thought it was excellent in how it gave the Biblical view of God, man, heaven, hell, justice and love in response to Rob Bell’s book Love Wins.

One of the things that caught my attention were a set of questions Galli asks in chapter 4 he writes:

“Do we want to know God, or do we just want to stop feeling guilty for living godless lives? Do we want to know God, or do we just want him to do something in our lives- that is, are we using God for our own agenda? Do we want God, or do we just want to please someone else, like a parent or a spouse who is a devout believer? Our wants are fickle and mysterious. God is mysterious too, but he is not fickle-he is the only one on whom we can absolutely depend. We certainly cannot depend on knowing what we want.” (page70).

These questions are straight forward…they don’t need explanation. They did remind me of Romans 2:24-29 which is a warning against acting a certain way without inward change and in doing so becoming hypocritical (I actually wrote a blog on that sometime back). These questions Galli poses can be summed up in one question: “what are your motivations for what you are doing?” I think it’s easy to automatically think of the ‘big’ things (Galli’s example is our relationship with God) but what about the ‘small’ day to day things we do?

I think it’s worth thinking about it.